Why Anthropic is Worth More Than India’s Top 5 IT Giants Combined

The combined market capitalisation of the top five Indian IT companies namely, TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra stands at around $257.4 billion (or ₹21.88 lakh crore) as of February 25. This combined value is still significantly lower than that of AI start-up Anthropic, whose current valuation is around $380 billion.

Even the free-float market capitalisation of the Nifty IT index, at $142.4 billion, trails far behind Anthropic’s valuation, highlighting the widening gap between traditional IT services firms and fast-growing AI companies amid investor concerns over AI-led disruption.

This comes at a time when global and Indian IT stocks are witnessing a largely downward trend driven by fears that AI-powered automation could erode demand for traditional software and outsourcing services.

How Anthropic Triggered IT Fall

The Nifty IT index has fallen more than 21% in February alone, marking its worst monthly decline since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The trigger to this was Anthropic’s expansion of its AI agent Claude Cowork on January 30, 2026, with 11 new plugins. The new plugins enabled the model’s agent to perform complex enterprise workflows across functions such as legal services, sales and financial analysis.

Anthropic’s update made an impact as it currently holds the largest market share in the enterprise segment amongst its peers. Overall, Anthropic has tripled its enterprise market share from 12% in 2023 to around 40% in 2025, highlighting its rapid rise as a major competitor.

A report by Menlo Ventures found that by late 2025, Anthropic had become the leading player in the enterprise LLM market, with its share rising to about 40%, surpassing OpenAI. This growth has been driven largely by Anthropic’s strong performance in coding tasks, where it holds a 54% share, and its success in high-stakes enterprise use cases.

Hence after the launch of new plugins for Claude Cowork, shares of legal software and publishing firms declined sharply.

Software and IT stocks had already been under pressure, but the sell-off intensified as investors reassessed the long-term outlook for the sector in light of AI-driven automation.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Jeffrey Favuzza, an equity trader at Jefferies, described the market reaction as a “SaaSpocalypse.” He characterised it as a potential crisis for software-as-a-service companies, noting that investor sentiment had shifted to aggressive “get me out” selling amid concerns about disruption, pricing pressure and slowing future growth.

Anthropic’s Sudden Take Over

Anthropic’s rapid rise has amplified the SaaSpocalypse concerns. Founded in 2021, the company recently raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round, doubling its valuation from $183 billion in its previous round to $380 billion.

During the last funding round, Anthropic stated that its revenue has grown more than tenfold annually over the past three years. Its annual run-rate revenue has reached $14 billion in 2025, up from zero in 2023. The company attributed this growth to its position as a preferred AI platform for enterprises and developers.

The number of customers spending over $100,000 annually on Claude has increased sevenfold in the past year. Many companies that initially adopted Claude for a single use case, such as its API, Claude Code or Claude for Work, have since expanded usage across their organisations. Two years ago, about a dozen customers spent over $1 million annually with Anthropic. That number now exceeds 500, and eight of the Fortune 10 companies are reportedly Claude customers.

In contrast, India’s largest IT firm TCS has a market capitalisation of about $94.8 billion, while Wipro’s market cap stands at roughly $25.2 billion despite being the oldest Indian IT company established decades earlier in 1945.

Indian enterprises are now looking to cushion the impact on IT services by integrating artificial intelligence into their workflows or partnering with companies that offer advanced AI capabilities.

Recently, Infosys announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI chatbot, to develop and deliver advanced enterprise AI solutions across sectors such as telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing and software development. The partnership will begin with the telecommunications sector through a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence, which will focus on building and deploying AI agents tailored to industry-specific business operations.